South Australia produces about half of all Australian wine, in addition it typifies the increasing divergence of mass-production and individually crafted wines in the country.

First, though, the basics:

There are 18 Wine Areas in South Australia, although perhaps only 10 are important, for one reason or another. About 60% of S. Australian wine is red and 40% white.

The 18 Wine Areas are grouped into 7 zones, and you will sometimes see generic wine from a zone rather than an individual area. This is only really of significance in the most South-Eastern zone – Limestone Coast, nearly 2% of S. Australian wine bears that generic name.

By far the largest area is Riverland, in volume terms, which produces 56% of South Australian wine, although by value it’s below a quarter! And it is Riverland that exemplifies the other distinction in South Australian wine: mass produced wine from high-volume grape growing versus grower crafted wine. In the European Wine World we often have the model of a Grower / Winemaker producing wines from their own grapes, grown for that purpose. This is far from being the only model, but it is a vague indication of the division between artisan and mass-produced offerings. However is South Australia only about 30% of wines are produced by the growers, the rest from grapes-bought-in (often, though not always) for mass produced plonk. This is even more severely the case in Riverland where the grower-made wine proportion falls below 20%.

The obverse of this statistic is that about 44% of wine outside Riverland is grower-made, and it is these wines that attract interest from the serious wine enthusiast. They amount to only about a fifth of all South Australian Wines, and these are even more heavily weighted to red – red wines are about 75%.

As to grapes – on the red side Shiraz (nearly half of all reds) and Cabernet Sauvignon (30%) dominate all other grapes; well over half of the whites are Chardonnay, and these three grapes make up 68% of all those grown in the state.

However all though every area grows several grapes there are several Area/Variety combinations (usually representing 20%-40% of that area’s production) that are well known, high quality and reaching premium prices. The most famous of these are BarossaShiraz;McLaren Vale Shiraz;Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon; Adelaide Hills Sauvignon Blanc;Clare Valley Riesling and Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon. These represent the easily viewed peaks of South Australian wine, but there many hidden gems… We shall see what the fuss is about in a tasting led by Kathryn on 16th March.